Fascinating! I spent the past two days at a software conference in the Barbican. (The SDD conf). The place is truly beautiful in a brutalistic way. Had lunch in the greenhouse.
Agree -- maintainable code was always important, but even more so in the age of AI. Unless we introduce proper guardrails via reliable code quality metrics, all these AI assistants will serve more as legacy code generators than genuine help.
That paper benchmarked the performance of the most popular LLMs on refactoring tasks on real-world code. The study found that the AI only delivered functionally correct refactorings in 37% of the cases.
AI-assisted coding is genuinely useful, but we (of course) need to keep skilled humans in the loop and set realistic expectations beyond any marketing hype.